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Posts & comments

A space's posts live in its Blog, organized into topics. Depending on what a space has turned on, posting can mean a few shapes: long-form posts, short notes, or galleries of images, video, and audio.

Writing and editing​

  • Your posts are yours. You can edit or delete anything you wrote, any time. Deleted posts leave a small marker; the content itself is gone.
  • Room to write. A post's body can run to 1,000,000 characters — long enough that you won't meet the ceiling writing an essay, a chapter, or a year of notes.
  • Drafts stay in your browser. The long-form composer keeps an unfinished draft on the device you were writing on — it won't follow you to another device until you post it.
  • Attachments — images, files, and links (with previews, up to ten per post) can ride along on a post. A YouTube or Vimeo link on a line of its own goes further: it becomes a clean inline player you press play on right there, rather than a preview card to click away from — unless the video's owner has turned off embedding elsewhere, in which case you get the usual preview card. The same holds in chat and in comments. You can also paste an image straight in with Cmd/Ctrl+V — it attaches like any other upload, in posts, comments, and messages alike.
  • Links to other DFOS things. Paste a bare link to a post, space, or event and it fills itself in — the link carries that thing's title instead of a raw URL, and its preview shows the details. Write your own link text and it stays exactly as you wrote it.
  • The fold. A long-form post can place a fold. Readers who don't have access to the post see only what's above it, with an invitation to continue in the space; everything below the fold never leaves the space.
  • Linking to a section. In a long-form post, every heading is its own address. Hover one and a small # appears at the end of it; click that and a link straight to that section is copied, ready to hand to someone who should start in the middle rather than at the top. Section links work on a post read inside the space and on a post that's been made public.
  • Changing the publish date. When you publish or edit a long-form post, you can set its publish date to any moment in the past. The post moves to that spot in the Blog and in chat. The author or a space admin can do this, and changing the date doesn't notify anyone.

Admins can additionally pin posts, restrict who can post in a topic (an announcements-only feed, say — see Roles & permissions), and send a post out as an announcement or an email broadcast. Either one reaches the people who can read the post, and broadcasts are paced — at most one per space every six hours. See Subscribers & broadcasts for the full picture.

Importing a blog​

Admins can bring an existing blog into a space. Choose Import → Post archive from the desktop's + menu, or Import posts in Studio under Reach → Posts.

  • What you can upload. A WordPress XML export, a Substack export ZIP, or a Ghost JSON export, up to 50 MB. A Ghost export doesn't include the blog's web address, so you're asked for it to bring images and links over.
  • Tags become topics. You pick a topic for each of the blog's tags, or create a new one. When a post has more than one tag, the tag highest in your list decides where it goes, and you can drag to reorder. Posts with no tag, including everything from Substack, go to one topic you choose, or you can leave them out with Do not import.
  • Dates carry over. Imported posts keep their original publish dates. Drafts aren't imported.
  • Importing again. For posts you've already imported, choose Skip to leave them alone or Update to replace their content and re-apply your tag mapping. Updating overwrites any edits made in DFOS since the import. Posts you deleted in DFOS are imported again.

The import keeps going if you close the window. When it's done you get a report of what came in and what was skipped, such as pages, duplicates, and unsupported formats. Import history in Studio keeps every past import and its report.

What a topic accepts​

A topic doesn't have to take everything. In a space's settings, an admin can tell one topic which shapes of post it accepts — posts, notes, media, or any combination, as long as it's at least one — and members only see the options left on. Setting a topic to notes only is how a space gets a running feed of short updates without long-form ever being offered there.

The same settings hold that topic's prompt: the line its composer shows, up to 280 characters, so an introductions topic can ask "Tell us who you are" instead of the standard invitation. Leave it blank and the usual prompt comes back.

Sharing a post outside the space​

An admin can let people read a post without adding them to the space:

  • Make it public. A single post — or a whole topic at once — can be marked public, giving each post its own shareable page readable from the space's public profile. Comments and members stay inside either way, and if a post has a fold, visitors see only the part above it.
  • Secret links. For a post you haven't made public, an admin can hand out a private share link. Whoever holds it can read the post's opening — the part above any fold — without the post becoming public and without joining the space. The link can be rotated at any time, which instantly kills the old one, or switched off entirely.

Turning off the space's Blog takes public posts down with it: they stop being publicly readable until Blog is turned back on, and you're told how many before you confirm.

See Who can see what for the full picture.

Comments​

Posts carry threaded comments — replies go one level deep. Comments support mentions and attachments, and you can edit or delete your own. When you @-mention someone, the people already in the conversation are suggested first. Files on the space's desktop can be commented on too; those comment threads are simpler — a flat list, no replies.

Upvotes and bookmarks​

Two ways to react, with an important difference:

  • Upvotes are public. Any member of the space can open the list of who upvoted a post, by name — an upvote is a visible signal, not a private one. Someone reading the post on a public page or through a secret link sees the count and nothing more.
  • Bookmarks are private. Bookmarking a post, comment, or message saves it to your own list. Nobody — not the author, not admins — can see what you've bookmarked.

Finding things​

Search covers the spaces you're in — posts, comments, chat messages, files' comments, and members — and never anything from a space you're not in. You can search one space or all of yours at once, filter by type, attachment, or author, and switch to Bookmarks to search only what you've saved, sorted by when you bookmarked it.